Walmart Canada plans to acquire Toronto food startup Foodmaestro to enhance customers’ online experience. The acquisition is the Canadian retailer’s first since the pandemic.
Foodmaestro is a data platform serving retailers and consumer package goods companies across Europe and North America with the capability to turn substantial amounts of data into usable attributes. The platform delivers transparency and digital experiences for customers focused on health and diet and offers customized content activation, such as meal planning.
Horacio Barbeito, president and CEO of Walmart Canada, says the integration is part of enhancing Walmart Canada’s e-commerce experience as it transforms to be the best and first omnichannel retailer for Canadian families. This acquisition will allow Walmart Canada to offer more personalization capability for its customers, such as highlighting safe products for those with food allergies or healthier options for people living with diabetes.
“We are very excited to welcome Foodmaestro to the Walmart Canada family,” says Barbeito. “Together we will continue elevating the online experience for our customers by sharing knowledge, investing in resources, people and product transparency. This enhancement to our online experience will allow our customers to make healthier personalized choices, which helps them live better.”
Foodmaestro’s digital platform processes over 14 million product attributes, 300,000 search requests and 6 million product validations in real-time each day. The service helps retailers who want to differentiate customer experience and deepen relationships with customers through enriched dietary information. Foodmaestro also enables its clients to provide their customers with greater product transparency and trusted information beyond the label, through SmartLabel.
Acquiring Foodmaestro will deepen Walmart Canadas’s talent bench by bringing in the Foodmaestro experts, including engineers and health and wellness talent.
“The acquisition of this talented team of experts from Foodmaestro is a big part of our transformation at Walmart Canada,” said John Bayliss, Executive Vice President, Chief Transformation Officer. “I am energized by what the future brings with our talented team of engineers and health and wellness resources working together to make the online experience even better for our customers.”
